Throughout our Workplace Timesavers week, Lifehacker's editors are going to get geeky about the most useful, beloved, and otherwise cool things in their office. In this case, it's a cheap-ish letter tray serving as a kind of poor (wise) man's docking station.

I came across the letter-tray-as-laptop-stand idea in a Flickr photo set, linked from Gina's roundup of 10 DIY laptop stands. I didn't think of it much at first—then my neck started hurting like all get out.

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I'm six feet and two inches tall, so when I sit at my simple slab desk, my head is pretty far up, even with the office chair at its lowest level. I'm also a fan of dual monitors, but too cheap not to use my laptop as one of them. That meant that for the longest time, I was moving my head up a few inches, then over a few inches to switch between my main monitor and my laptop screen, and both of them were below my normal sight line. That doesn't make for a healthy workspace, and after a while, I was spending an hour pathetically horizontal on the couch every night, acting like I'd lifted logs all day.

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So my laptop needed to come up. At the same time, I didn't want an elaborate, perfectly aligned solution, because I'm frequently grabbing my laptop and heading out the door. Finding myself at Staples one day, I spent some time looking through the letter trays and desk organizers. Eventually, I found it: a black steel mesh letter tray with tiered slots.

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Click on any images below for a larger view. Also: the white paper is only there because it's hard to shoot black laptops on black letter trays on a black desk.

Why was this perfect? I didn't even fully get it until I got home and put it in place. First, it's just deep enough, laid on its side with the openings facing me, that the laptop is lifted to a more neck-friendly level. That elevation also helps with USB plugs, by the way—some plugs are very hard to jam in when a flat notebook is flush with a table. I'd also guess that elevating my ThinkPad off the table, and providing a little mesh breathing room underneath, helps keep the system heat down, but I've never really measured.

Next up, you get some free, easily accessible desk storage. I mostly use mine for cords that I frequently use, along with sundry things like mints, pens, and a reporter's pad, when it happens to be there.

But the real computer geek benefit to a letter tray stand is tucked in the back. Because the inbox slots are elevated, there's a small space you can tuck items into. In my case, I keep a USB hard drive back there with a short plug, so I can easily hook it up to my USB multi-port for backups. I also shove my power brick into that space, sometimes tidily, often not, so there's not a cord running across my desk.

It's not exactly pretty back there, but you can't see any of it from the front, due to the black mesh metal and elevation.

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So there you have it—my elevated, storage-friendly, clutter-hiding, possibly hardware-saving laptop stand that's actually a semi-cheap letter tray. Sadly, I can't find my exact letter tray at Staples anymore—just a few things kinda-sorta like it. If you find this little guy or another like him, or know of another great makeshift laptop stand, you know we welcome the link in the comments.